Downhillbattle.org Bounty For P2P Gaim Plug-in

thecombatwombat writes "Music activism site Downhillbattle.org has started a fund to pay a bounty on a peer-to-peer plugin for Gaim. With new laws threatening peer-to-peer, Downhill Battle thinks this is the future. Regardless, it's an interesting funding of open source."

Comments

Exactly. Too many hypocrites around.

[humberthumbert]

I'm a pirate because I am cheap. I don't go around talking about how I'm helping poor defenseless artistes and outmoded business models and whatnot.

One statement you often hear is how musicians should make a living from live performances. In many countries, such as mine, there are no live music circuits to speak of.

Also, pie-in-the-sky idealists often forget that
studio time costs money. So does drum skins, guitar rack effects, rehearsal time, transport, competent music techs etc.

I know many readers here create their music entirely in software, but that won't really cut it in the real world.

Already did this

[BrainP1L07]

First, even though gaim is a nice little tool (it's my IM too), it's not a great jewel that could get hurt by such a plug-in. Legally, that would make no sense. Technically, Gaim is already full of security holes, and it seems it's gonna be that way for a while. Second, sharing music with _real_ friends is a good idea, but it's an old one actually. Only "new" stuff here is to make this P2P extension a Gaim plug-in. Nevertheless, sharing with friends you know in the real life still is a solution to the RIAA monitoring problem. I mean, a lot of people have been downloading like hell on global p2p networks, (at least until RIAA started to send some to court), and you probably have a couple of friends with huge music databases already. Well, i have. Third, the coolest thing for a geek in using such IM networks to share p2p hasn't been mentioned yet. Actually, i've coded a small "IM" tool using the MSN network to exploit it: basically, when you open a conversation with one or more friends, you actually open a connection to a shared "MSN socket" on Microsoft servers. Everything you send to it (once) is then repeated by the server as many times as there are people taking part in the conversation. You get it: what you have is actually a free broadcast socket. Considering lack of bandwith is the main problem with p2p, this is quite nice. OK, i know it wouldn't work if everybody was doing the same, cause MS would have to prevent it. So, please be nice: don't do it. I'd like to go on using my tool as long as possible.:)